Thursday, 6 May 2010

In the Council report (page 8-9) from the recent meeting of the European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA) we find the true face of the EU Commission when it comes to the new parliamentary rights of the EP after the Lisbon Treaty reform (own highlight):

"A representative of the Commission explained that the proposal was aiming to simplify and make more transparent the existing four comitology procedures. He explained, that Member States could not stop an implementation measure on their own but needed a qualified majority to do so. He said that it did not seem necessary to repeat the scrutiny powers of Council and European Parliament in this Regulation."

This quote refers to the the draft proposal concerning the implementing powers of the European Commission and the related comitology procedures (Article 291 TFEU).

2
comments:

Maybe the stagiaire who wrote this summary should have spent a little bit more time revising it, but I think this means the Commission's position is that the "scrutiny powers" of the Council and the Parliament already follow sufficiently from the Treaty, so that there is no need to repeat them in the Comitology Decision. This is also the reading that is most consistent with the interventions of the two MEPs who are also mentioned in the summary.

If I am correct about this, it follows that the Commission representative had no intention of suggesting that the scrutiny powers of the other two institutions should be reduced.

The EP report on this draft regulation is going to be voted on 23 June, with votes on 'opinions' by twelve committees between 1 and 22 June.

I - Ries Baeten - have a hand in preparing one of the opinions, so feel free to propose texts and I will give you my judgment. But please take the trouble, first, to go through the meeting documents available on the Parliament's committee websites.

The hot item here is to delete article 10, as proposed by the Opinion rapporteurs of both ENVI and AGRI.